SM 2000

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Reprinted With Permission from Cuir Underground

Copyright (c) 1997 Cuir Underground

From Issue 4.0 - September 1997

S/M 2000
Or, How Perverts Can Save The Fucking World

By Thomas S. Roche

Well, fellow pervs and connoisseurs of kink, it's finally happened.
S/M's gone mainstream. It's being pumped into the corpus of society
like an IV drip from an enema bag.

It's not like we didn't see it coming. Trent Reznor wore a ball gag on
MTV, and the Marquis deSade became excessively flatulent in his grave.
Madonna got moderately kinky in Sex, and old Leo Masoch's hungry ghost
let out a discontented belch.

We -- both the royal "we" and the ostensible siblinghood-of-perverts
-- always knew S/M was destined for overwhelming popularity. How could
it not be? Clearly sickos are having way more fun than the rest of the
world. Pervs, as a rule, have more sex, better sex, and infinitely
more stylish sex than the vanilloids who fill the strip malls and
Honda Accords of America. It's only natural that said vanilloids,
sooner or later, would wise up and want some o' dat.

And it isn't that far for them to go. Isn't kink at the core of this
whole society? Isn't power exchange -- usually non-consensual power
exchange -- the fuel that runs this nasty world? Doesn't capitalism
get us in a headlock and growl "suck my jock, boy!" every single day?
It makes sense to me that with all the kinks and power imbalances in
the workaday world, consensual S/M -- explicit and negotiated -- would
gradually come to the forefront of the existing sexual culture.

This seems to be part of a pattern. Among "normal people" (e.g.,
vanilla heterosexuals), oral sex grew in popularity in the radical
sixties until it became, for many, almost a cultural assumption. Anal
sex became more and more common in the permissive seventies. Due to
AIDS, the eighties were, for many people, about fear and mourning, and
for others about learning to communicate their needs for safety and
negotiation around sex. For still others, the eighties were about
Flock of Seagulls, coke, and stirrup pants instead of sex. It only
seems natural that the nineties, with their end-of-the-millennium
sense of impending doom, are bringing about a widespread awareness of
and interest in S/M, kink, fetish, genital jewelry, and all their
perverted brethren.

Movies and books about kink are everywhere, both kink-positive and
kink-ambiguous, but there's a striking lack of truly kink-negative
stuff in recent years. Jokes about S/M show up on prime-time sitcoms.
Keanu wears leather pants on the cover of Vanity Fair. Lollapaloosers
slam-dance while shuffling their ampallangs. It's only a matter of
time before Chelsea Clinton gets a nipple piercing. I have glimpsed
the future, and lemme tell ya, it ain't Star Trek.

But don't be so sure that you can finally get that NEA grant for your
dildo sculptures, because even with S/M imagery everywhere, we're sure
not living in an S/M utopia -- not now, and probably not ever. It will
be a long damn time before there are two floggers in every pot and you
can pick up a Wurtenburg pinwheel at Macy's or FAO Schwartz. No matter
how much Bob and Barbara Boring might like the idea of kink, most of
its new popularity is a fair-weather perversion.

"All it means," says author, activist, and radical pervert Pat
Califia, "is that the entertainment machine is incredibly hungry and
amoral, and will exploit anything that it can. Yes, that operates to
our advantage in some ways, because it does increase our visibility
and it does send a message to people who are looking for it that kinky
sex is out there. But that increased visibility is of absolutely no
use when we need to do things like fight the Spanner case or the
Little Sisters bookstore case." The pop culture leviathan couldn't
give two sloppy fucks about the lives and liberties of perverts.
Califia points to Madonna's Sex as an example of that indifference.
"Sex whizzed through Canadian customs like someone had lit a fire
under its ass because Time/Warner attorneys had met with Canadian
customs officials and a policy decision was made to let Sex through.
But my books, John Preston's books, and all sorts of other S/M
publications are routinely confiscated."

So just because your cousin the Huey Lewis fan bought a cock-ring for
her boyfriend, don't worry -- we're not in danger of being assimilated
any time soon. When the shit hits the fan, it's still the pervs who
are going to have to duck.

Cyberkink

With the World Wide Web growing like bamboo, it has become possible to
access enormous amounts of information with great ease. And what do
you think Biff Normal in Truck Stop, Oklahoma is going to want to
access? You guessed it. He wants some o 'dat. Susie Average in
Department Store, Illinois? She wants to download pictures of the
Virgin Mary with a bullwhip, and she wants a dog collar for Christmas.
Or maybe a fourteen-inch strap-on with which to invade Biff's
bourgeois sensibilities.

It is now possible for people who live almost anywhere in the world to
receive vast amounts of kinky images and information without having to
look a sleazy biker sales clerk in the eye through a cloud of cigar
smoke and say, "Uh, well, yes, I would like a bag for my copy of
Transsexual Latex Enema Nurses VXIII, if it's not too much trouble."
In the computer age, on the other hand, we have almost no security --
some 13-year-old computer geek in Arkansas could be monitoring your
downloads from the transsexual latex enema nurse home page -- but you
probably don't worry about it. Information piracy by computer is too
abstract for most people to conceptualize, unlike the shame many
people feel facing a postal clerk who frowns in disgust as he hands
them their copy of Puppy Love in one of those see-through plastic bags
marked "THIS ITEM WAS DAMAGED IN TRANSIT."

But Web surfing, online cruising, and Internet chat rooms aren't
necessarily all they're cracked up to be. Anyone who's ever received a
"WAT ARE YOU WERING? i AM NAKID" Instant Message on AOL can tell you
that much. The quality of the S/M information offered online isn't
necessarily all that high. Theodore Sturgeon's Law (usually applied to
science fiction) says that 90% of everything is crap, but old Ted
never had cybersex. Any shmuck can design a web page. Once you get
into AOL or Internet chats, you are doing the masochism tango among
the great unwashed. Why, many's the night some hapless would-be master
has ordered me to fuck my dog.

S/M Negatives

William Henkin, PhD, a San Francisco psychotherapist, S/M educator,
and co-author of Consensual Sadomasochism: How to Talk About It and
How to Do It Safely, thinks there's a negative stage in the
popularization of S/M. "That stage is where all the public stuff about
S/M goes sour. For instance, I imagine we will see more people who saw
S/M discussed on a talk show and thought it would be a great idea to
handcuff their girlfriend or boyfriend and beat them bloody. The
safety information about S/M usually follows a few steps behind the
eroticization. There's a very real danger in any sophisticated
sexuality if information does not accompany the play."

Cecilia Tan, pervert writer, S/M activist, and founder of Circlet
Press, sees radical changes in the way information is distributed. The
S/M community has been changed by the wide variety of books now
available on S/M. "The thing that's so difficult now about the concept
of an S/M community is that new people coming to S/M play don't have
to join a community to get the information they need. It used to be
that the only way to meet people who were into S/M was to go to the
bars, or to the Society of Janus, the Eulenspiegel Society or the
Fifteen. Now, even if you don't have a computer, you can get
information about S/M in most large bookstores.

The future of S/M to me is about the rise of the power of the
individual. The thing that's disturbing is that we -- the S/M
community -- are becoming irrelevant, and we don't like that. We
consider ourselves the guardians of safety and tradition, and now any
schmoe anywhere in the country can pick up a book or get on the net or
read some magazines and get concrete information about S/M. If we're
going to be a viable community in the future, it will be because
'those people' -- the newer S/M players who maybe didn't come through
the bars and the organizations -- and 'us people' -- the long-time
community members -- work together to preserve the knowledge and
traditions and increase our clout. If the community is to survive, we
need to reach out to those who are finding S/M in new places and new
ways."

Califia points out, "The only way you used to be able to get into S/M
was to learn from someone who had done it. It was tyrannical and
arbitrary, sure, but you actually had to go out and do S/M in order to
learn about it. Nowadays, I think many of the people on the Internet
who claim to be S/M experts have never actually done it. One of the
problems with the glut of how-to books and other information is that
it creates an impression that you can read a book or watch a video and
learn how to do this stuff."

Come to the Dark Side, Luke

It is the fear, the darkness of S/M that attracted us perverts to it
in the first place. We don't do it because it's safe, we make it safe
because we want so very much to do it. If the seasoned players -- the
ostensible elite of perversion, the guardians of Preston's leathers,
the capos of the Kink Mafia -- forget why we joined the pervert club
in the first place, we are never going to make sense to new players
who wish to learn about it. We'll end up preaching to the converted,
living in our own little box, and talking to ourselves.

S/M is about Risk

When it comes down to it, for me S/M is about risk -- physical,
emotional, and spiritual. It's about surviving when the shit hits the
fan. It's about giving yourself up to a situation, a person, an
activity, and getting yourself back -- stronger or weaker or maybe
just different. Some things you can't learn from a book or a seminar
-- you have to teach them to yourself. There is the illusion,
sometimes -- in all that sex-positive, shiny happy information -- that
S/M can be made 100% safe, sane, and consensual. But S/M has never
been 100% safe for me, and I wouldn't want to do it if it were. When I
do S/M I'm taking a risk that I'll find something strange and
beautiful inside me or another person or a situation that scares the
living shit out of me and maybe makes me look at things a different
way -- a way that fucks with my world, and changes it, even just a
little. It's a cliche' that S/M is supposed to be about "the dark
side," whatever the hell that is. I think S/M is about shining a light
inside yourself and others and finding out what's there, even if
you're not so sure you want to know.

S/M is a Biohazard

S/M is definitely a biohazard. It turns oppression in on itself,
commodifies it, explores it, transforms it. If you think that doesn't
frighten the jockeys off The Man, think again. He's quaking in his
wingtips because we know all his secrets.

So, if you'll indulge me for a minute, the future of S/M is not in the
meat, but in the motion. Not in the technology, but in what it is made
to do. Pop culture spreads misinformation, but people who want to hear
the truth will go to some lengths to find it. The folks "out there" in
the real world -- whom I have half-assedly referred to as the
mainstream, as if that existed -- are simply aching to hear what us
kinky folks have to say. They are desperate to learn. But we must be
willing to teach. The sources of misinformation will continue
broadcasting their static and drowning out our truths if we let them.

I don't know about you, but I'm off to save the world. And believe me,
the world needs it, bad. To save the world, we perverts must be honest
and fearless. We must tell the truth, crusade against ignorance
wherever we find it, and not take any shit.

And -- pay attention, now -- we must have some really fabulous clothes
to do it in. Who the fuck wants to join a revolution if they can't
dress snappy? Above all, no matter how thick the bullshit out there
gets, we must be wearing some really killer footwear. I've got my
spike heels on, you've got your combat boots, Butch over there's got
hir thigh-highs -- let's go open some minds. The future is here, my
fellow sick fucks. Let's make it beg for mercy.

Thomas S. Roche is a writer, performer and editor, and a member of the
training staff of San Francisco Sex Information. His books include
Dark Matter, Noirotica, Sons of Darkness, Brothers of the Night, and
Gargoyles. He is currently at work on a twelve-volume historical
slapstick set in ancient Crete tentatively entitled The Brutal Night
of the Subterranean Toaster-Dwarves.